ASCIIcast 348 - The Rails API Gem

With rich client-side applications becoming more popular a common question is “Should I use Rails if all I need to do is provide a JSON API”? If you need to develop such an API you should take a look at the Rails::API gem by Rails core member Santiago Pastorino. The README for this gem goes into detail and describes what Rails gives us that’s useful if we just want to build an API. Rails is very modular and this gem provides a generator for creating a streamlined Rails application that strips out everything we don’t need if we’re building an API. In this episode we’ll use it with a very simple application to see how it works.